Blanchett backs Australian artist over nude adolescent photos

Leading Australian writers and artists, including the Oscar-winning actor Cate Blanchett, have defended a photographer facing prosecution for his pictures of naked adolescents.

Bill Henson's photographs of a nude 12- and 13-year-old boy and girl had been due to be shown in an art gallery in Sydney last week, but were confiscated by police after complaints from a child protection campaigner. Other galleries have now removed similar works by Henson from public view, and a fierce debate is raging in Australia about the balance between artistic freedom and censorship.

Blanchett, a mother of three, was among a group of prominent Australians who showed solidarity with Henson by signing an open letter expressing "dismay at the police raid on Bill Henson's recent Sydney exhibition, the allegation that he is a child pornographer and the subsequent reports that he and others may be charged with obscenity."

The letter, released yesterday, said that although public debate about Henson's work was welcome any prosecution of one of Australia's most respected artists, or the owners of the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, which was due to show the seized work, would damage Australia's cultural reputation. It added: "We should remember that an important index of social freedom, in earlier times or in repressive regimes elsewhere in the world, is how artists and art are treated by the state."

"The intention of the art is not to titillate or to gratify perverse sexual desires, but rather to make the viewer consider the fragility, beauty, mystery and inviolability of the human body ... It is more justly seen in a tradition of the nude in art that stretches back to the ancient Greeks, and which includes painters such as Caravaggio and Michelangelo."

Among the 42 signatories are prominent members of Australia's arts community, including are the playwright Michael Gow, writer Peter Goldsworthy, and Elizabeth Ann McGregor, the director of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art.

The South African-born author JM Coetzee, an Australian citizen, castigated the prime minister, Kevin Rudd, for calling the pictures "absolutely revolting". Coetzee said: "Nothing he said led me to actually believe he had given proper thought to the questions at stake, which are actually quite subtle and complex."

Henson's powerful and edgy photographs are highly sought after. Called a master of the use of light and dark in the tradition of great European artists, much of his latest art deals with the subject of adolescence.

Police in New South Wales are still investigating whether the photographs violate obscenity laws.

Rudd said it would not be appropriate to intervene but said he stood by his comments. "I am passionate about children having innocence in their childhood," he said. Henson has not spoken publicly since the controversy began.